Who you calling bird brain? Pigeons can count as well as monkeys, claims study

But it seems that pigeons have another remarkable talent – they can count.

Researchers found the birds could compare pairs of images involving up to nine objects and order them by the lower to higher number.

Remarkable: In tests pigeons were able to order groups of images according to the number of objects in them

Until now, only humans and other primates were thought to be able to use abstract numerical rules in this way.

‘Our research not only shows that
pigeons are also members of this exclusive club, but, somewhat
surprisingly, their performance is on a par with that of monkeys,’ said
Dr Damian Scarf, of the University of Otago in New Zealand.

'Pigeons have impressive mental abilities'

The researchers initially trained the pigeons by presenting them with 35 sets of three images, each with one,
two, or three objects of different size, colour and shape.

They were rewarded with wheat when
they pecked the images in the correct ascending sequence.

Next, the
researchers sought to test if the birds could take what they had learned
from ordering the three images and apply it to images with higher
numbers of objects than they had seen before.

Brainy: Rhesus monkeys can also count according to research

They were presented with
pairs of images with between one and nine objects and tested on their
ability to respond to them in ascending order.

As well as performing above chance in
these tests, the pigeons also demonstrated a ‘distance effect’
comparable to that found in landmark U.S. research in 1998 involving
rhesus monkeys performing similar tasks.

The greater the distance between the
numbers in the pairs, the faster and more accurate the pigeons were, Dr
Scarf said in the international journal Science.

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‘While this is
obviously a long way away from how humans can count, it shows an animal
with a brain structured quite differently to ours is still able to
perform complex mental tasks of which only humans were once thought
capable.

‘Our findings add to a growing body of
evidence that pigeons are among a number of avian species exhibiting
impressive mental abilities that really do give the lie to the old “bird
brain” insult.’

Dr Scarf now plans to test the kea, a
New Zealand parrot, which has been claimed to have the intelligence of a
six-year-old child.